Marissa Mayer, You're Doing It Wrong!

Marissa Mayer caused quite a stir last week when she ordered a ban on telecommuting. Many see this as a step backwards culturally for Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO) , but that's not necessarily the case. The problem is more the means than the ends. She's right to try to get everyone into the office, but she's going about it all wrong.

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The real fact is: Who created telecommute jobs?? It was the company not the employees. How Marissa Mayer know the telecommute employees are doing a poor job working from home? This is not about doing a poorly job working from home but something else. Also as CEO she needs to be in the office. What writer didn't mention on the article is that Marissa Mayer worked from home a lot in the past before becoming a CEO. Now that she is a CEO she must come to the office. Her frustration turns into revenge. It is already proved that employees working from home work more that employees going to the office. Just because you go to the office doesn't mean you work more. Employees waste more time in the office than working from home. All the chatting with co-workers, coffee, lunch and cigarette breaks, all the walking to other offices, conference rooms, printers, bathrooms,etc. Marissa contradicts herself with her dictatorship attitude forcing employees coming to the office BECAUSE yahoo has a lot of offshore teams working remotely for a company that is located in the USA. If she wants to end the telecommute work first: have all Yahoo employees hired and working in the Yahoo office located in the USA, stop hiring offshore teams. Second: STOP spending money with VPN and stop proving VPN services this way employees cannot connect to yahoo network. This is really the reality BUT she doesn't do that because her announcement for forcing employees to come to the office is about: directorship behavior, getting rid of employees without firing them, poor management, blaming yahoo failure on the employees working from home, PR strategic to be always in the news and not really finding the real cause why yahoo is loosing market share. Company created telecommuting work to save money with real state, services ( utilities bills), office equipment, free coffee, office space, furniture, rent, parking in lot spaces, maintenance employees, parking in lot cots, and the list goes on and on. She now created a bad imagine for herself with the yahoo employees by doing that she will loose their loyalty to the company, bad image to the business & technology community and bad imagine to the yahoo users. This was a really bad move for a CEO. Now she created a villain image and no company will hire her as CEO anymore.

Interesting perspective... but who is to say that Marissa Mayer isn't updating the work "culture" there. It'd take time but eventually Yahoo could have a similar work environment to that of other tech firms. I feel there is more happening behind the scenes than just "no working from home" statue.

This is the last gasp of a yuppie put at the helm of a foundering company. The enmity created will kill whatever esprit d'corps existed, cause an exodus of senior staff, and the only ones who will replace them are kids out of college. I wouldn't give a plugged nickle for a share of Yahoo now, or before this happened.

Folks, this is not about Telecommuting. This is about a complete lack of company culture. Ms. Meyer is smart enough to know that people working from home is not the problem. But, she faces a herculean task of completely changing a disengaged, negative company culture into something productive and effective. Sometimes changes like that can happen fastest by burning the fields and replanting, rather than meticulously weeding. I don't know enough about Yahoo's specific circumstances to know whether a drastic move is really justified...but I do know that a company that was previously fat and happy for years on end is a company that will not accept change easily.

Turfscape has a good hypothesis. Yahoo management systems are broken. The proof is in the poor results as a company. Regardless of employees who are better or worse performers, management sets the goals and measures results. Poor results can be caused by poor employees, but the whole company having poor results is a poor management system. That includes those at home workers who likely included managers. Props to Marissa Mayer who is taking a bold action. She also will be accountable for better or worse. It is definitely hard for most of us to empathize with whiny employees who just got called back to the office after being given new iphones and gourmet free lunches at the office. If they think it is unfair, maybe they should quit. Do they think the contract janitors at the office have it as good as they do?

Marymenino, I don't think working more, from home, always equates to the employer getting more value out of that work. Also I don't think Marissa's primary intent was to suggest that remote employees are slacking off but rather that the work that they are doing 1) Has greater potential to be misaligned. 2) Can result in greater opportunity loss.

Certainly this is a great inconvenience for many remote Yahoo's and as CEO I would be emotionally and commercially concerned about employee turnover but I think in the long run the efficiency and commercial benefits of having a co-located workforce will be key to Yahoo!'s turnaround.